I’m joined again by Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang & writer Scott Hayden to do a wrap-up of Wednesday’s GDC news including all of Sony’s PlayStation VR Announcements, the Star Wars Trials on Tatooine experience by ILMxLAB, and Scott’s in-depth reaction to Minecraft on Gear VR. We also cover some GDC demo highlights including Sony’s Social VR, the 3D Tetris-like game Super HyperCube, block stacking game Tumble VR, Ubisoft’s social deduction game Werewolves Within, and Sony’s series of social mini-games with Playroom VR.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here’s the different topics we cover:
- 00:34 Star Wars Trials on Tatooine
- 05:58 Minecraft on Gear VR
- 14:24 Sony PlayStation VR Announcement & News
- 19:20 Sony’s Social VR
- 21:12 Unity VR editing tools
- 23:37 Dreams content creation game
- 24:24 Sony announced Star Wars Battlefront VR
- 25:45 AMD Radeon Duo Pro
- 26:49 Super HyperCube
- 27:43 Chronos
- 28:15 TumbleVR
- 30:07 Werewolves Within
- 33:48 Playroom VR
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and I'm here today with...
[00:00:18.442] Scott Hayden: Scott Hayden. I'm a writer at Road to VR.
[00:00:21.867] Ben Lang: I'm Ben Lang. I'm co-founder and executive editor at Road to VR.
[00:00:25.651] Kent Bye: Great. So today is Tuesday night. This will be airing on Thursday. And by that time, we'll have all the embargoes will be out for GDC. So let's just go ahead and talk about some of the biggest news since we last caught up.
[00:00:40.473] Ben Lang: Yeah, so I think probably the highlight that I saw since last time that we talked earlier this week was going to the Lucasfilm campus and getting to see their new Star Wars Trials on Tatooine experience. Lucasfilm has this division called ILMxLAB, which is Industrial Light and Magic, xLAB, which is, of course, the kind of the effects studio that is responsible for the early wonderful effects in the Star Wars movies and many of, you know, a lot of innovation in the digital effects world. So they started up this XLAB, which is kind of this small experimental group who is trying to define and understand how real-time media will be used for storytelling in the future, especially immersive media, AR, VR, that sort of thing. And so they have been experimenting, and of course they own the Star Wars IP, so that is a nice, rich, already built kind of world for them to tap into, and a thing people love. So they've been doing a number of different, using a number of different technologies to explore that, and the latest thing that they did was this Trials on Tatooine experience. It was about 8 to 10 minutes long for the HTC Vive. And this was the first one where they finally put a lightsaber in your hands, which everybody has always wanted. When they first grab a VR motion controller, they'd be like, oh, we could do lightsabers, right? And there's been so many different fan adaptations of Star Wars VR stuff, because it's like, VR is all about, oh, I want to be in amazing worlds. And Star Wars is this cherished place. And so we've seen lots of fan stuff. But finally, we're starting to get these official experiences. And so I got to play through that and, you know, wield the lightsaber and it had the wah-wah as you're swinging it around. It had the Millennium Falcon in it and you didn't actually see Han or Chewie but they were voice acted in the experience. And for X-Lab this was a more interactive experience than they have done in the past and Lucasfilm and X-Lab are coming from the storytelling film world which is, you know, basically not interactive at all. So, more interactive than not interactive at all is not very interactive for people who are used to playing games, but you know, they're getting there. They're starting to explore this intersection between telling a story and you're just watching it and you actually doing some stuff. So, in this particular experience, Trials on Tatooine, the Millennium Falcon flies in and R2-D2 comes down the ramp and he has something to give to you. But before that happens, you have these TIE fighters come flying by and, you know, firing at the Millennium Falcon, and with shots landing right by you, like, it's pretty darn cool. Because they're using all of the, you know, they're working with Skywalker Sound, who is, like, the audio division within Lucasfilm. They're working with, you know, the real assets, the real noises, and they're doing it, of course, very authentically. So, you know, you see these TIE fighters, like, coming in from the distance, they come just Tearing by and like shoot you and just yeah, it's the movie and you feel like you're in the actual movie really cool So they fly off and they've done some damage to the money and falcon and you have to reach up with the vibe and grab this panel and pull it down which has been broken in some way and there's all these cables and buttons and you know Han and Chewie like press that button you try it and doesn't work like press that button you try it it doesn't work and then they're like the TIE fighters are coming back just press every button And then eventually that does whatever it needed to do and the ship's cannons come online and then they blow them up. And then at that point you're like, alright, that was cool. And then you see this other ship come in and it drops off a bunch of stormtroopers who are coming for you now. And that's when R2-D2 decides to give you the thing he came to deliver, which is a lightsaber. You grab it with the Vive controller and you tap the touchpad to turn it on. You get the... And, of course, I had to move it around my head to make sure there was some positional sound in there for the worrying, and it was there. So the stormtroopers come in, and they don't actually get close enough for you to, you know, slice them in half, which I think would be incredibly fun, but we'll probably get there. But they came in, and they have their blasters, and they're smart enough to not get close. So they're trying to shoot at me from afar, and you actually use the lightsaber to reflect their blaster shots back at them and take them out. So you destroy all of them, and then Millennium Falcon flies off. fun but just basically like just a teaser like it was only like eight minutes long and that includes like the scrolling text at the beginning to set up the story it's like the real whole little experience there was probably about five minutes and it's just like I want more of that I want to do more with the lightsaber you know I want more interactions and so For me, it's a great thing to see the studio committing the time to do these experiments, and they tell me that they are working and committed on big projects for this stuff. So, like, they're really clear that Trials on Tatooine is an experiment. It's not supposed to be a game, and that's why it's a little five-minute thing. It's just kind of a proof point. But they're telling me, John Gata, who is the chief creative director of XLab, has told me they are committed and basically working on things that are much more substantial projects that are to be released compared to the experiments like this that they've done, and that's super exciting. It's not 100% certain whether that's Star Wars or other IP which they've been working with, but the fact that they are doing stuff and going down this road is incredibly positive for VR and anybody who loves Star Wars and loves Lucasfilm's ability to create very iconic worlds.
[00:05:59.603] Kent Bye: Awesome. What about you, Scott?
[00:06:00.623] Scott Hayden: What are some highlights? I was very jealous. That was my highlight. And honestly, I'm unhappy with the fact that you started out with the coolest thing possible. It's like, so what did you do, Scott? I did also some very interesting things. Just recently, I'm a big Minecraft fan, and although the Gear VR version of Minecraft is just vanilla Minecraft. We're gonna put that out there. It's just vanilla Minecraft, and you're alone. Which is... and I don't want to put a wet blanket on it, but I very much appreciate the fact that I can snap into a Gear VR and play a game that I'm really used to playing. In two different ways, really. So I had a great deal of fun playing that they've integrated some very interesting VR comfort modes that we're gonna be writing a little bit more about You know, definitely the really needed first-person mode where you click a certain percentage help me with the name of that snap turn or also known just as VR comfort mode to some people and And the point, though, that I wanted to get to is that it's not the achievement of putting Minecraft on it that's making it great. It's the amount of people that are gonna see Minecraft on Gear VR and immediately understand, okay, this works for the platform. And it very much did work for the platform. I didn't walk out feeling that it was a sloppy port or like it wasn't doing what Minecraft really needs to do. I can build in Gear VR. Granted, it's not going to be the social interaction that we had in Minecraft that sort of started the social VR movement. It's a very different experience. But it's something that, when it comes out fully, it's going to be interesting to see how they sell it and how people respond to it.
[00:07:38.808] Kent Bye: Yeah, actually, I talked to a Microsoft representative, and they said it's actually technically not a port. It's actually using the exact same code base. And John Carmack came out, and he was making that same exact point. And they were asking him about, are they going to be able to add mods? It sounds like you'll be able to add quite a lot of those things in terms of having a full experience. And you'll have to do things like change the visibility settings like you wouldn't be able to see as far as you could in the Minecraft. And also, I don't know if you noticed, but it was a monoscopic experience. So they don't have stereoscopic yet. And a lot of people, I didn't notice. And they said that afterwards. It was like, oh, wow. You have enough depth cues from the world that you don't necessarily know that it's not stereoscopic.
[00:08:21.333] Scott Hayden: I didn't notice that at all, actually. That's really interesting that you mentioned that, because I guess what made me not even think about it was that they start you out in this rendered room, and then you hit the touchpad on the side of the Gear VR, and it forces you into this large FOV monoscopic thing, but it never once occurred to me that it wasn't exactly a stereoscopic injector or something like that.
[00:08:44.313] Ben Lang: Yeah, that is really interesting, the lack of stereoscopy. And that may have something to do with the fact that, you know, that world doesn't look anything like our world. It's made completely out of huge cubes, which, by the way, quick question for you, Scott, did those cubes feel, like, bigger than you kind of had in your head how big they were in real life?
[00:09:03.112] Scott Hayden: I live in Minecraftia. I know they're one meter by one meter by one meter. It's one meter cubed. Did they look like one meter cubed? Not necessarily. And I guess, you know, in hindsight, with the fact that it was monoscopic, one thing that we had spoken about earlier that just sort of breezed past me was that I had mentioned that it looked like a large FOV, like it just looked like a very large FOV version of Minecraft, and that maybe I wasn't so happy with that. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that it was monoscopic. To get back to your point, was everything the right size? I tested that out by burrowing deep in, you know, doing the standard lazy Minecraft thing where you just go straight through a wall, you do head, body, you do the top and the bottom, and you go as far as you can. And you see how you feel, you know, if you feel at all claustrophobic, you know it's doing its job. I didn't really get that sense. It's true. I didn't get that sense of claustrophobia I also didn't get the sense that I was really like mortally menaced by creepers either But I did spend about 10 minutes in it. So
[00:10:07.740] Ben Lang: Well, I also played the Minecraft mod, the kind of unofficial mod that came before, and I definitely had senses of claustrophobia and fear to turn around and look into the face of a creeper who, as a player on the normal version, is frightening because it threatens your creations, essentially, and also your character health. When you turn around and you see that and it feels like it's life-size and it's coming at you and you know it's going to blow up, It was pretty frightening the first time I saw that. So, you know, maybe it has something to do with the monoscopic. Maybe it has something to do with the field of view not being as wide as the Rift. Maybe it has something to do with lack of visual tracking. Who knows? I haven't had a chance to try the official version yet. But what I'm really looking forward to and hope happens is, you know, right now, as I understand it, the way to build is your cursor is on your face. And so when you want to build blocks, you're looking and then pressing a button and then looking in the new spot and then pressing a button. And that to me feels like a crutch for just kind of the current limitations. I feel like in the future for the Windows PC version on the Rift, I really hope it gets touch support so that you can, instead of doing these kind of weird unnatural movements where, you know, you're rotating your head to look to where you want to place the thing, just pointing with your hand or with a touch controller is so much more natural than that. And I feel like You know, we can articulate our hand very quickly, very accurately. Doing that with our head to construct what I feel like would be quite a bit slower and just stranger. Because we do a lot of things like, you know, I can be looking somewhere and point my hand in a different direction than where I'm looking and the hand is usually what does actions. You're just gazing at things and the real world does not often ever cause an action. So it seems more natural to me to, you know, let's get touch in there, and maybe mods would be able to do that, that would be great if it doesn't come officially, but let's get touch in there, let's just, you know, stick a laser pointer on there so you don't have to run over to where you want to place that next block, you can just point that laser pointer exactly where you want it and say, block, block, block, block, block, you know, right down the line real quick. I feel like that would be a much quicker, more natural way to build, and that's what, you know, Minecraft is, a huge portion of it is building, and so I hope that they can extend those tools. It's understandable why they would put it on Gear VR, but I want to toss a question back to you that I actually didn't pick up because you were the one there checking everything out. You said you were alone. Is there no multiplayer in the Gear VR version of Minecraft?
[00:12:33.797] Scott Hayden: Not that I'm aware of. I actually didn't get a chance to speak to anyone who was directly involved with it. I had one downstairs. I played it with our lovely support staff. And I didn't get a chance to really investigate it that far. I bet Ken.
[00:12:45.862] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I checked it out as well and talked to someone from Microsoft and was overhearing a lot of what John Carmack was saying. But because it is not a port, it's actually the full code base, that they're fully intending to take it as far as they can. So I think that, for sure, they're going to have different multiplayer. It was said that they were dropping every other third frame, so it was only 40 frames per second rather than 60. So this is kind of the first time they've showed it, and they've got a long way to go before it's ready for launch, I think. They didn't announce any specific dates. I asked them, and they don't know when it's actually going to come out. But I can imagine that there's still a lot of optimizations that they have to do. And the asynchronous time warp, Carmack said that kind of saves your bacon a lot of times. And so it's good enough that you don't really necessarily notice it.
[00:13:30.898] Scott Hayden: I think what's really important, though, about the demo is that it was a pre-constructed area that they led you through, and the render distance was... it was very much built with that in mind, with the demo's render distance in mind. It was small, it was... when I build things in Minecraft, I want to build, you know, great underground. I want to dig too deep, you know, and I want to see what's down there. And I don't know if you could really do that in an honest-to-goodness, you know, loaded chunk of that game, you know, because what happens when you get down to the cave, And it's this massive cavern and you're supposed to you know Or what happens when you go to the nether and that's a giant place and your render distance is only so large You know how immersive is it at that point when you can't have some of the very basic things of desktop Minecraft that are built into it
[00:14:19.673] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I'm sure all those will be answered in time and performance will only get better in the display. Everything is just going to get better over time. But let's move on to perhaps Sony because, you know, Sony had a big event today where they had a number of games as well as announcements. So maybe you guys can talk a bit about that.
[00:14:36.599] Ben Lang: Yeah, absolutely. So today was kind of the big reveal for Sony, which was the release date and the price for PlayStation VR. So they were the last to announce and also the least expensive to announce was interesting. So the PlayStation VR headset is going to cost $399. That doesn't actually include the cost of the PlayStation camera. So for those who don't already have one, you will have to add another $50 or $60 on top of that price. But it does come in underneath the Rift and underneath the Vive. And then the release date will be in October, so if they're really launching in October and it's not just their first small batch of units, they'll be set up pretty nice to be getting this in the hands of people by the holidays, which is exactly what they should want to do. which is great. In addition to that, they said by the end of the year, which is, you know, if it's launching in October, the end of the year is not too long from there, by the end of the year they'll have 50 games for PlayStation VR, and today we got to see there was a selection of 20 different games, a couple of which were new, some of which, you know, we knew about, and they were shown today in more advanced states. one of the interesting things that I saw today that hasn't really been talked about up to this point is like what is it actually like to use the PlayStation VR headset with the PS4 in terms of like before you go into the game, like how does any of that interaction work? And so the answer to that question is basically when you put on the PlayStation VR headset, you get a view of the PS4 dashboard that is put on a basically on a little virtual screen out in front of you. Oh, actually it can be big. I shouldn't say little. There's three different zoom modes for it. But they just put the dashboard right there, it is exactly what you'd expect the PS4 dashboard to be. So it's not wrapped around you or anything, it's just on a floating screen in front of you. And that means you can do essentially anything that your PS4 can do with the headset on. So you can play PS4 games on that screen there, and you can zoom it to various sizes. And when people hear like, oh, well, you know, Steam did this too. Steam's going to allow you to have this virtual theater mode where you're sitting in a room with a big screen in front of you and then you can play your traditional games on that screen. And a lot of people are like, well, that's pointless. You know, what's the point? It's basically just going to be lesser resolution than you'd expect on your monitor. But actually, for some games, and PlayStation showed me this functionality playing the game Flower, which is a really interesting kind of casual game for the PS4 where you are kind of free-flying around in this big, open, beautiful grassland. And although it wasn't made for VR at all, and it's just the game shown on that screen, you can get that screen pretty big, and the way that game happens to work really gave me a pretty cool sense of flying around with these flowers. It's kind of hard to describe because it's a very abstract game. But it did feel cooler than just seeing that on a TV, because the screen was big enough. You can zoom it in and out. The screen was big enough that you did get still some sense of being closer and more in there, not quite as much as when it's wrapped all the way around. So that was very interesting. But the essential functionality will be, you put on the headset, you get that dashboard, you launch your VR game, it will launch you into the game, and then when you quit the game, you'll go back to the dashboard, and then in addition to that, there is also going to be a 360 photo and video viewer. for psvr and that'll be able to show basically standard photos and videos kind of on the virtual screen the 16 by 9 screen but then if you load up a 360 degree photo or video there's a button in there that you can press which will wrap it all the way around you and they show this in action and it looks very good i saw a video demo that they had worked on which is using some pretty interesting video tech to capture it was of a violinist playing And it was one of the highest quality VR videos that I have ever seen. And that was really cool for me to see because, you know, so much of the focus on PlayStation VR is games, games, games, games. But, you know, at least they have this functionality in here to view media and there's people, you know, within the company who are working on bringing film and photo functionality there too. So that's great to see and it was impressive to know that even though they aren't focusing on film as much as they are on the game end of things, they are researching and finding very interesting and high quality ways to show 360 video through that system.
[00:18:57.345] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just did an interview with Helen Situ from NextVR, and she said that they're going to be launching on all of the different major head-mounted displays, so including the Rift, the Vive, and Sony PlayStation, so it's kind of reaffirming that there will potentially be an ecosystem of apps that aren't all games on the Sony PlayStation VR.
[00:19:14.795] Ben Lang: Wait, I'm sorry, which, what is it that's going to be launching, Crosshead?
[00:19:18.997] Kent Bye: NextVR, which does the live streaming. I also was at the Sony event and there's a number of experiences to me that stood out. One was the social experience that Sony had. You know, you got a chance to look at their abstract stylized avatars with kind of big heads, big bodies. The feet were attached to the ground and the feet were pointing in the direction where you should be pointing because they do have a front-facing camera. I found myself, you know, getting turned around a lot and starting to lose tracking and the minder had to kind of turn me around. But the feet are always kind of pointed towards the camera And, yeah, just having the two hands in there and the head and the body kind of tracks the head. And so, you know, I like to dance. And so, you know, there's a mirror there and I could like dance and just, it's pretty amazing how much body language that you can really show just from hands and head. I talked to one person that was a developer on the social VR experiences for the Sony PlayStation. And she said, yeah, you can totally identify people from their body language just on their hands and their head moving around, which I totally could tell as well as in this social space. And similar to the toy box demo, there's someone who's guiding you through this social experience, but there's four people. And yeah, it wasn't quite as highly dynamic and interactive as a toy box. I've still got this good, nice sense of social presence and a little bit of a sneak peek for hearing how the microphone within the PlayStation VR works and to be able to actually have a conversation and have a sense of social presence through the PlayStation VR.
[00:20:51.117] Scott Hayden: Now, I had seen it briefly mirrored up after the event. Larger heads, larger hands. Maybe that's the reason why it's so easy to understand. Because you see a lot of these social VR programs that essentially have these blown up heads, these head blobs. And maybe that's exactly where it comes from, that everything's an exaggeration. So just a thought.
[00:21:12.908] Kent Bye: What are some of the other big news items? I think Unity made some announcements today. And do you guys have any additional information at this point?
[00:21:21.262] Ben Lang: So at Unity today, they were talking to their kind of big developer base. So a lot of the information that we saw today was just very engine specific. But at the end, they did show the kind of latest version of their VR editor. And so they had showed this back at the Vision Summit recently and showed kind of the basic functionality. of being able to bring objects in and move them around. This time, they're rapidly working on this. They're just trying to get a nice proof of concept down before they really build it out. But what they showed today was this, what they called kind of like a chessboard mode, where being in VR is great, but if you're always in first person and you're trying to set up a big environment, you don't want to have to teleport all the way over to the other end to put, you know, a house there and then all the way back to put a tree somewhere else. So they have this chessboard mode where you can basically pull up a miniature version of the entire environment and it is, you know, replicated exactly. And it's basically shrunk down to a little size of a chessboard in front of you. You can see all of the different assets that are there kind of in the area. And so instead of having to kind of run yourself around the space, you can just look at this little chessboard, you know, pick up a model of a house and scoot it over a few inches on the chessboard, which in the real big environment around you is going to be, you know, 100 feet. And it just makes it much easier to rough out really big scenes where you might want to be setting up a whole town or a mountain range. You don't want to be trying to configure a mountain range at human scale because it'd just be really difficult because little movements would move the whole huge mountain range way too much. This chessboard gives a lot of flexibility in saying, alright, I want, you know, I want these three houses here, I want these trees right here, to just really rough it out, and then you can jump in to do those fine-tuning adjustments, you can place lights and adjust them perfectly how you want them. And this is all inside the Rift, using the touch controllers, and their goal is to reach a point where people don't, you know, need any programming skills, they can just go in and naturally, you know, pull up their list of assets and say, I want this to go there and kind of build a world in that way. And then hopefully we'll see ways for people to start making, you know, game, you know, you still need a way to add mechanics into that space. And hopefully we'll see that that come into play as well as they continue to develop their VR editor.
[00:23:38.314] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I went to the VR mixer that was on Monday night and had a chance to talk to some developers. And some of them had a chance to try out Dreams, which is the PlayStation where you kind of have this open world creation of narratives and dreams. And it looks really beautiful and kind of mind-blowing. And to me, I think that's another one of those content creation tools that just uses the controller that seems to be empowering a lot of people to do that kind of narrative content creation.
[00:24:04.541] Ben Lang: Yeah, so I was actually interested to see that at the PlayStation event today, Dreams wasn't among the many titles there. I think they said that they're going to do something in VR. It almost feels like they just started building the game a little bit before they realized it should be 100% VR, but it is good to know that it sounds like they will be implementing it in some way. but it doesn't seem like it'll be a launch title based on the fact that it wasn't at the event today. But one bit of news from the Sony event that we did gloss over a little bit, tying back to kind of our first topic, is Sony announced, in partnership with EA and Lucasfilm, they're gonna be creating a Star Wars Battlefront VR experience, which is, for anybody who likes Star Wars and has played those games, is amazing, because it's like, The Star Wars Battlefront world is just ridiculously detailed, incredibly authentic, and it's the kind of game that when you see it, you're like, oh my god, this would be just, this would blow my mind in VR. And so of course, you know, they're not gonna, we're expecting they're not gonna just port the whole game to VR because it's a first-person shooter, it wouldn't quite work. But there is this richness and incredible graphical fidelity that they have already created there. So hopefully we will see, you know, some, it's not clear if it's gonna be storytelling or driven or experience driven, but just to be able to utilize kind of the battlefront world that's been created already, just being able to walk around the environments that they've made for that game, I think in VR would be totally amazing. It's not gonna be hard for them to make something awesome, but it was really cool news. They announced basically no details other than saying, it exists, we're going to do it, and it's coming exclusively to PlayStation VR. So we'll probably learn more later, but it's very exciting to see those companies now working on something of this kind of scale.
[00:25:46.685] Kent Bye: So yeah, one other thing that happened on Monday was that there was the AMD press conference where they announced the Radeon Pro Duo, which is a dual GPU card that runs around $1499. And I talked to Roy Taylor, and one of the things he said is that this is going to be a good card for content creators. And he alluded to a couple of things. One was that for video stitchers, so for people who are doing a lot of video processing, that's going to be able to accelerate their process to be able to do that work. But he also alluded that a lot of the content game engines are going to be able to somehow do some content export. So I could just imagine being able to generate 360 degree videos from a Unity or an Epic Games and that's something that I would expect that sometime in the near future to be able to more easily create immersive trailers because you know I talked to Immersive where they do a lot of ad content and At the time, they're just doing 2D ads within a 3D theater. So, you know, we're starting to see, like, this ad networks that are out there and that eventually I could see, like, that's gonna be a full immersive trailer where you're able to really look around. But just to kind of wrap things up here, I know that because, you know, Road to VR is kind of like seeing a lot of the different games and they're not necessarily new, I'm just still kind of curious if there's any number of titles that are exciting to you. One for me that was there today was the Super Hypercube, which is like a Tetris for VR. And it doesn't outside look like it would be very interesting, but it's one of those games that when you actually play it, it has to me a very high replayability because you have to really use your visual spatial skills to be able to rotate these blocks in your mind. And it just translates really well to VR. And it's something that I could see myself playing over and over again. And they're trying to really tune it so that they can have like a global leaderboard so that people can just really play it and get those high scores. So, but I'm curious from you guys if you've had other games that are out there that, you know, we may have seen them before, but you're still really excited to get your hands on.
[00:27:44.069] Ben Lang: Yeah. Well, we talked on the other podcast. So for those who want more detail about this, go back an episode or so. We were talking about the Oculus stuff with Chronos is one for me, which is like an adventure game on the Rift, which is going to use the game pad, but just seems like they've made this incredibly deep world. and I'm really excited to get in there, explore, and see how deep it goes, and just play combat and connect with a character, hopefully. It seems like a throwback to when games were just really all about, you know, linear narrative action and exploration and adventure, so I'm really excited for that. There's also another game that I played today at the Sony event called Tumble VR, and this was basically a VR-ified version of an older game that was once for the PlayStation Move. and it's a physics puzzle game where you're, you know, you might be stacking stuff or trying to balance things, blocks that you're moving around with the controllers, and I only got to play 10 or 15 minutes of that, but by the end, they were, like, starting to pack up the event, and I hadn't solved this one puzzle that was really challenging, and I was like, no, I'm gonna have to buy this game just to solve this stupid puzzle, because, like, I was really frustrated. I wanted to reach that goal of completion, and this particular one was finding a way to stack three objects so that you could reach a certain height and it's like totally not as obvious as it sounds and They said they showed it running with the with the track to DualShock controller So what you do is you kind of point an object? Click on it the object would zoom over and kind of stick to your controller and then you move the controller around to place it where you want it and then click again to drop it and They said they're also going to have move support, which will be, I think, a little bit more natural. Because right now, what you do to basically rotate objects is you grab them, they stick to your controller, and then use the thumb stick to do just kind of 90 degree turns. But with move, I imagine you'll be able to have that precision of hand articulation. And, you know, I don't think this is the sort of game that is immediately obvious to be in VR, but having that natural way of being in there and being able to look around at the puzzle and the objects and to be able to stack things naturally using motion input instead of, you know, a very rigid XYZ grid of controller movement is, I think, gonna be really cool. Like, I want to go in and play through those puzzles and do it. It seems like it's gonna be a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to that.
[00:30:01.377] Kent Bye: Yeah, I spent about five or six minutes and gave up on that hard puzzle. It was really hard, but super fun, I agree. So, what about you, Scott?
[00:30:08.405] Scott Hayden: I got a chance to play, it's called Werewolves Within, and it was, the Embargo was just released this morning on it, and it's from Red Storm Entertainment, you know, Ubisoft affiliate studio. And what was really interesting about that game is, if you haven't heard about it, it's this take on a game, this 1986 Soviet game called Mafia. And it's a social deduction game, and it's a social VR game built around this social deduction game, also known as Werewolf. And in a group of five and eight people, you're dealt these randomly assigned roles and within these randomly assigned roles, one person is the werewolf. And you have to root them out with your ability, whatever ability you may have. And it's supposed to always be dynamic each round you play. But playing it with four other journalists sitting down, actually three other journalists and an Ubisoft employee, I didn't get to see him because we just jumped right into the Oculus Rift. I saw who he was, and he was this very Hansi-looking Bavarian guy, and I was this Romani woman that immediately just jumped in, in a very uniquely well-polished world that looked like it just jumped out of Frankenstein. I've never actually played Mafia before, and so a lot of it to me was novelty in discovering a social deduction game in itself. But one in a place that works so well, which is obviously social VR, this was what really hooked me into it. And I know it's going to pick up people just like me who are naive to the style of game, and just go with it, because the ability to get into these headsets, which they said that they haven't targeted exactly, they haven't released exactly what platform they're going to be targeting, all major headsets, most likely, just from conjecture, it's something that we're going to have to keep an eye on, because this is a very, very cool game style that I'm looking to play a lot more of.
[00:32:08.918] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to maybe flesh that out a little bit, because I've played werewolf a lot, you know, in real life, mostly at conferences. And the idea is that there's maybe two werewolves and five villagers. And at the end of each night, the werewolves can kill one villager, and then the villager will wake up in the morning, they'll be dead. And so then the villagers, during the course of the day, they can choose somebody in the room to lynch and kill. So the villagers are trying to kill all the werewolves before the werewolves kill all the villagers. And so it's basically like someone asks you, are you a villager? And you always say yes. But you're basically just trying to figure out who's lying, because everybody, of course, is going to say yes, but even if you're a werewolf, so you have to play all these different games. And so There's healers, there's different roles, so that someone will be able to, in the middle of the night, they'll be able to check to see if someone's a werewolf, and if they are, then they may have that information, but then if they come out and say, I know who the werewolf is, and then the werewolves will obviously kill them before they can do any more damage, and so then there's a healer. There's just all these different roles that can interact with each other, and yeah, I've been saying for a long time that these types of social games where it's basically about Getting a large group of people together who like these types of games, which is actually really difficult to do You know unless you have like a meetup in a town that does that but you just imagine that people who don't have access to these communities be able to play these games and It's actually pretty intimate you learn a lot about people in terms of like, you know how they try to lie and cheat and you know, basically it's you're trying to See if someone's like telling the truth or not so I'm super excited to see like how they pulled this off And you know if it kind of mimics the feeling of playing real wolf in a real group
[00:33:49.479] Ben Lang: Yeah, on the social games as well, one of the other things that was really cool to see at the PlayStation event was Playroom VR, which is going to be a free download for anybody who buys PlayStation VR. And it is exclusively a series of basically party minigames, where one player is in the headset, and then up to four players not in the headset using controllers, or some of them actually don't even require that the other people have controllers, can play and participate in some game together. Sometimes the headset person and the outside people are working together, sometimes they're against each other, but I think it's... The fact that that title is coming free and it will therefore, you know, be tried by lots of people, I think that is a really smart and fun way to get a whole lot of people inside of that VR space and interacting and playing. Even if they don't have the headset on, you can still, you know, be playing with five people and all having fun together, even though you only have one headset. And so, you know, not only is this adding this kind of social party game element, but it will, you know, hopefully get these people who would otherwise not want to jump into more of a hardcore VR game to try it on and see these kind of lighter but more social and interactive games. And I played through each of them and they're pretty darn fun. One, well just one example of the five was There's a game where the person wearing the headset is a cat who is hiding behind these drapes, these blinds. And just on the other side of the blinds in the kitchen are the other four players who are all little mice. And they have to run around and collect all the cheese in this area. And they're hiding, like, under, you know, under a can, under, you know, behind a carton of milk or whatever. When they run around, they come out and they're mice, but as soon as they stop, they hide under their little object. And so the cat's job is to basically, you know, thrust their head out, out of the curtains to catch the mice right, you know, when they're out of their cover. And if they're out of their cover, you'll, you'll grab the person and drag them in and, you know, you kind of effectively eliminate them from the round. And it's just this really funny, you know, thing where you're like, you know, as the cat, you're like leaning in, am I going to do it? Am I going to go through? And then all of a sudden you, you know, you blast your head through the curtains and try to catch people off guard. And it's, you know, a lot of kind of laughing and shouting and trying to trick each other with timing. And it's a very unique experience compared to playing a game where everyone's in a headset, actually. It opens up new game design possibilities. And I think Sony's done a pretty good job right off the bat identifying several unique little party games like that. And I hope that they add more to that over time.
[00:36:26.540] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. Well, there's certainly a lot more coverage that we're gonna be doing articles I've got at least 20 or 30 interviews that I've done that I'll be spreading out for the next, you know, two or three four months So, thank you again you guys for joining me today. Awesome.
[00:36:40.211] Ben Lang: Thank you so much again.
[00:36:41.272] Kent Bye: Thanks again fun as always And thank you for listening if you'd like to support the voices of VR podcast then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voices of VR
